Hard Disks nowadays are bound to fill up over time no matter how big their storage capacity is. With the internet facilitating users to easily download and save troves of movies, songs, games, apps and countless other types of software programs, a day is bound to come when even a gigantic hard drive will also fill up.
Temporary Internet Files and other types of Junk Files also play a key role in the filling up of hard disks. The following tricks shall help you get rid of frequent low disk space notifications and recover a healthy amount of disk space.
Cleaning up the hard drive is an easy task when performed with a specialized software. This makes the whole cleanup more thorough yet safe!
Cleanup C drive with ST Cleaner
ST Cleaner adheres to Clean Software Association Guidelines
Clean Up your Hard Disk
Disk CleanUp is a disk analyzing tool that comes as a package along with Microsoft Windows. The initial disk analysis searches for files that are no longer needed, thereby freeing up storage space. Such files include contents of Recycle Bin and system cache, caches of offline Internet pages, old compressed files, old backups, downloaded program files, system and application logs, traces left after program uninstallations, and so on.
- Click the Start button on the Taskbar.
- Click All Apps | Windows Administrative Tools | Disk CleanUp.
- In the case of multiple partitions, you’ll be prompted to select a partition.
- Let the disk analysis process finish. Upon finishing, you’ll see many checkboxes on your screen. Check all the items you want to be cleaned up, go ahead, and start the process.
Clean Up Old Restore Points and Change Storage Limit
System Restore Points allow users to undo recent changes that might have caused some unwanted errors. Windows reserves a maximum storage space to be allowed for old System Restore Points, which is typically around 7GB. This storage limit is filled up with time as System Restore Points keep on adding up, Windows automatically adjusts it by deleting the oldest Restore Point. We recommend deleting all Restore Points as well as the amount of disk space reserved for this purpose to ensure most old restore points are simply replaced by newer ones. Simply follow these steps to do so:
- Right-click This PC desktop icon, choose Properties.
- Click “Advanced system settings” | System Protection | Configure button.
- Click the Delete button to delete all Restore Points.
- Move the slider to the left side to reduce the “Max Usage”. Keep it around 2GB, and then click OK.
- Now click OK on the System Protection tab.
- Reboot your laptop/ computer.
Uninstall Programs you Never Use
To regain more hard disk space, remove the programs that you never use. This may include freeware tools, browser helper objects (such as third-party toolbars like Yahoo, Alexa etc) that come when you install applications from untrusted sources. It is safe to uninstall these apps. Here’s how:
- Click the Start button, choose Settings.
- In the Settings window, click on the System icon.
- Click Apps & Features tab located on the left-hand side of the screen.
- Sort the applications by their size. Choose this option from the drop-down box.
- One by one uninstall all unwanted applications and finally restart your system.
Using Search
Open File Explorer. In the Search Box on the upper right corner of the window, type these keywords (in bullet points) one by one to get results about all the files in your system that belong to these file types. Once you see the results, proceed to delete all the files to retrieve some more storage space.
- *.tmp
- *.temp
- *.log
- *.bak